Kenneth McGill’s face was drooping, his voice slurred and one side of his body numb in 2012 when he told a nurse at the Jefferson County Jail that he was having a stroke.

A U.S. District Court jury has awarded McGill $11 million after finding Monday that Correctional Healthcare Companies and its employees at the jail were deliberately indifferent to his medical needs when he had a stroke.

Sixteen hours had passed before McGill received treatment.

The Jefferson County commission, Sheriff Ted Mink and the nurse were named in the 42-page lawsuit.

The county would have to pay only if the company fails to do so, and the county would not be held liable for the $7.6 million in punitive damages, said McGill’s lawyer, Anna Holland Edwards.

“We believe the facts in this case represent an anomalous situation and are not indicative of larger issues with inmate care at the jail,” said Writer Mott, senior assistant Jefferson County attorney. “Earlier in this litigation, the court found that Mr. McGill did not have a direct liability claim against the sheriff or any deputies.”

“We were surprised by the verdict,” C. Gregory Tiemeier, a lawyer for Correctional Healthcare Companies, now Correct Care Solutions, wrote in an e-mail.

After Monday’s jury decision, the company and McGill reached a confidential agreement, Edwards said.

McGill, 46, said Tuesday he still walks with a limp, is constantly dizzy and suffers some paralysis to his right side as a result of his stroke Sept. 17, 2012.

“I was scared to death that I was going to die,” McGill said in a phone interview. “I was actively having a stroke in front of nursing staff, and they were telling me that I was wrong. It was pretty disheartening.”

McGill, who was being held on a DUI charge, was working in the jail kitchen when a headache struck and he began to feel dizzy. A nurse told McGill he was probably dehydrated and told him to drink water.

Later, as he tried to go to dinner, he had trouble navigating the stairs. A deputy put him in a wheelchair and took him to see a physician’s assistant, who took some tests and again sent him back to a “pod” where his bed was.

“While he was sitting in the common space, trying to watch the Broncos game, his symptoms dramatically escalated,” according to the suit, handled by civil rights lawyers Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman.

Another inmate noticed the right side of McGill’s face was drooping and told him that he believed he was having a stroke, the suit said.

McGill decided to call his wife and ask her for help getting medical assistance. In the phone call, which was recorded, McGill “sounds tearful and terrified,” the suit said.

On the call, he cried and slurred his words. “My whole right side is like numb. I can’t talk. You don’t know how hard it is to even talk,” he told her.

His wife, Jen McCracken, is a former correctional officer and didn’t know that medical staffers already had seen McGill. She urged him repeatedly to go to the medical staff.

“She told him that he had to get to the hospital immediately,” the suit said.

A fellow inmate, Vance Goetz, told a deputy that McGill needed medical attention. The deputy got McGill into a wheelchair and brought him to the medical area. Gina Battenhouse, a registered nurse who is named in the lawsuit, tended to him.

McGill told her he thought he was having a stroke, and asked to see a doctor and go to the hospital.

“Are you a doctor?” she responded. “Have you had a stroke before? What do you know about strokes?”

Battenhouse didn’t chart his drooping face and other symptoms, the lawsuit said.

“This defendant (Battenhouse) falsely reported four times that his gait was normal and he could walk around the room,” the lawsuit said, even though he couldn’t walk normally and had been brought to her in a wheelchair. She said he was having a panic attack and sent him to a bed to rest.

Another inmate, Mike Moore, who had worked as a paramedic, checked on him and convinced a deputy to call another nurse.

The nurse arrived and said, “I’m just here to give him an ibuprofen.”

At 1:59 a.m., he was placed in a special housing unit with another inmate for observation. He wasn’t given a mattress, according to the suit.

“He was intentionally and punitively left to lay on the concrete floor … thinking he was dying — for almost seven hours,” the lawsuit says.

McGill didn’t see a doctor until 9 a.m. The doctor checked him over and, instead of transporting him to a hospital, called the nursing staff in front of McGill and yelled at them for ignoring a stroke.

At around 10 a.m., deputies took McGill to Lutheran Medical Center’s outpatient area, instead of the emergency room, further delaying treatment.

An MRI found that he had had a stroke, and he was taken to the emergency room, “well over 16 hours after the likely beginning of his first stroke,” the suit said. The lawsuit maintains that the company and the county defendants acted with deliberate indifference to the “obvious serious medical needs of patients and inmates.”

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